Canberra refuses to release report on ABC funding

Political editor, The Age

The Abbott government has refused to release a report that supported more funding for the ABC, insisting it would breach the cabinet confidentiality of the Howard government.

In stark contrast to its attitude to documents from the former Rudd government, the manager of government business in the Senate, Senator Mitch Fifield, refused to make the report available, saying it disclosed the cabinet deliberations of the Howard government.

''Successive governments and the Parliament have long recognised the public interest in maintaining the confidentiality of such deliberations,'' Senator Fifield has said in a letter to the clerk of the Senate.

The document is a 2006 report by KPMG into the adequacy and efficiency of ABC funding. The ABC has told Fairfax Media it has no objection to the report's release.

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The decision to withhold the report was derided by shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus, who described it as ''astonishing''.

''It is unbelievable that this government is prepared to invoke cabinet confidentiality when it involves a former Liberal government, but has handed over cabinet documents from a more recent Labor government,'' he said.

The government has forwarded cabinet documents from the defeated Labor government to the royal commission it has set up on the abandoned home insulation program, reserving the right to make submissions on whether they should be protected if the commission seeks to publish them.

Independent senator Nick Xenophon said the KPMG report should be released if the party that was the subject of it - the ABC - had no objections. ''How can it not be in the public interest?'' he said.

The report was in a different category from cabinet documents on the home insulation scheme, where there were compelling arguments to uphold the convention of cabinet confidentiality, he said.